Accenture has decided to walk away from its £2 billion contract to help modernise the National Health Service’s IT systems. A termination deal has been worked out in which it will pay only £63 million to its government client, Connecting for Health – a lot of money, but presumably better than it could have been.
But what a shocking indictment of the IT governance within this flagship project: one of the world’s top IT consultancies prefers to cut its losses despite such major cost to itself, while the project itself is already running two year late. I imagine that CSC, which is taking on Accenture’s role, will be looking for major assurances that the project goalposts will stay fixed henceforth.
